When Did We All Start Talking Like Valley Guys?

Male upspeak is the scariest trend since man-leggings: Dudes are starting to sound like extras from Clueless. Here, a concerned woman examines the grave consequences—social, political, possibly even sexual—of having everything you say sound like a question

Imagine a world where everyone—everyone—sounds like Shosh from Girls. Obama to Putin: "We need you to, like, stop invading Ukraine?" Putin to Obama: "Um, I’d like to see you try and stop me?"

You know what upspeak is, right? You don’t? Well, let me, like, explain it to you? There, now you can hear it: Only two of those sentences were interrogatives, but in the high-rising intonation of upspeak, all three landed as questions. If you’re picturing a young, attractive girl-woman talking, forcing you to weigh whether you can tourniquet the blood trickling from your eardrums long enough to get her undressed, think again. Now it’s your best friend doing it. Or worse: you. The fact is, men are now upspeaking, too.

Two recent studies confirm this. The first, conducted by sociologist Thomas J. Linneman, found a startling incidence among male contestants on Jeopardy!, especially when ringing in to gently correct an answer by a female contestant. ("What is...a mildly sexist form of public chivalry?") The other, more disturbing study, was done at the University of California, San Diego, where linguists found that even though young women upspeak twice as often as men do, those men (ages 18 to 22) still upspoke a lot. "Men don’t think they do it," a co-author of the study told The New York Times, "but they do."

The roots of this sociolingualistic scourge are murky. Could there be a link to Internet snark? Maybe. Is it a new generation of Sensitive Guys trying to sound like women in order to relate to them? Perhaps. I’m all for men behaving more ladylike in certain areas, e.g., the fact that we’re all modeling so little body hair that it’s like dolphins mating. But that doesn’t mean I want you to sound like Reese Witherspoon in the Legally Blonde treasury, no matter how wily and underestimated she was. The dialect has never shed its airhead baggage, and it never will.

I know, I know, we’re told to reject all kinds of things as false markers of stupidity. BASE jumping, blowfish eating, Keanu Reeves. I’ll concede that all three might be smarter than they look. But I’m sorry—wait, no I’m not—upspeak is always fatal. I don’t care if you trade credit-default swaps or splice stem cells. If you’re upspeaking, I don’t trust you to slice bologna.

Consider, just on a logistical level, what might happen if you started upspeaking some basic sentences. You should, um, avoid the bathroom for fifteen minutes? This could lead to a misunderstanding. I might take it as a mere suggestion, wander in there, and be sucker punched by a toxic wall of molecules. Or: I think that’s, like, too expensive? If you have a partner with "different ideas about money," understand what she might do with this: treat you like the quavery schoolgirl you sound like and buy herself a fancy new bag. To put your plums in because you don’t need them anymore.

I called Linneman, from the Jeopardy! study, and asked if he had thoughts on how this whole thing might affect male-female relations. After unscientifically agreeing that most people find uptalk "annoying" no matter who’s doing it, he admitted his study didn’t "code" for such things but that he wouldn’t "necessarily advise uptalk in the mating ritual."

So I hope you’ll trust me. The future of the species depends on it. If you’ve caught yourself uptalking, please let me speak for Womanhood and demand that you, like, stop it. Because the last thing a woman ever wants to hear a man say is: "I want to fuck you?"